Film Review: The Future (3.5 stars)

If you had to invent a genre for Miranda July’s new film, it might be “emotional sci-fi” — pain, loss, grief, lust and guilt come alive around characters like gaseous substances, alternatively choking and convulsing them. No, the gases aren’t visible onscreen, or in 3-D, but July herself has called her second feature “a horror story.”

It’s hard to disagree with her, but The Future still has a lot of funny and tender moments, too. Such is the treasure of July’s work; it’s as daring and disharmonious as life and love can be. (See exhibit A: Her debut feature from 2005, Me and You and Everyone We Know.)

The Future’s awkward moments are many, given the fractious nature of the subject matter of two people trying figure out how to lead meaningful lives among the social minefield of their thirties. But that isn’t to say the story, its dialogue and its frames don’t have flow: July’s firm vision and script and Andrew Bird’s hand in the editing booth make sure of that. Composer Jon Brion (Synecdoche, New York, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and music supervisor Margaret Yen’s work with the film’s music guide us almost imperceptibly, if at times pulling a little hard on heart strings. Although bookending the film with Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman’s classic rendition of the wistful showtune Where or When, particularly over the closing credits frame with the stars still in view, is stroke of maudlin meditation that even Woody Allen would cheer.

But the first thing we hear in the film is a cat (PawPaw, voiced by July), who narrates throughout. Later, there’s also an orange sweater that crawls, and the Moon, which waxes philosophically while time is stopped. Did I mention the little girl who plants herself in soil up to her neck?

Yes, this is a distinctly Miranda July film funhouse, and she uses it deftly to move between cringing moments of self-doubt and startling catharsis, such as the dance sequence by July’s character that forms the emotional climax of the film (and is worth the price of a movie ticket all on its own).

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At its centre, The Future tells the story of a thirtysomething Los Angeles couple who’ve grown unhappy with their lives: Jason (Hamish Linklater); and Sophie (July). They live in a sparse apartment and suffer through dull day jobs (tech support for him; children’s dance teacher for her). Then they decide to adopt … a cat.

PawPaw, who’s ill and dying, can only be picked up a month after medical treatment. We hear from PawPaw throughout the movie, on being on “the outside,” on being wild, and mostly, wondering when the couple who “petteded” him so he “made the sound cats make when they are trying to tell you that ‘I am the one who belongs to you’ ” will come back to retrieve him. At least for feline lovers, it’s the coup de graçe of cuteness in The Future.

But the film’s main action is dark and troubled, and revolves around what Jason and Sophie decide to do with the month they are waiting on PawPaw. After finding out from a vet that the cat could last another five years, meaning the couple would be 40, and left with only “loose change” (Jason’s words) in terms of time to make their dreams come true, they panic.

In a creative paralysis typified by the non-stop watching of DIY dance videos on YouTube, Sophie clings to Jason’s moods and her orange sweater. Jason starts to avoid taking tech support calls. After quitting their day jobs, the pair resolve to pursue their respective real dreams, even just for a month, before PawPaw’s scheduled arrival.

So Sophie cancels their Internet and decides to make 30 dances in 30 days (“I’ve been gearing up to do something really incredible for the last 15 years” she says while not really believing it); Jason ends up as a door-to-door activist/tree salesman for a climate change awareness group, not believing he can change anything; she fails early and often; he tries to quit at one point; she eventually does, and spirals into utterly helpless despair, embroiling herself with a broken family, a single father, Marshall (David Warshofsky) and his troubled daughter, Gabriella (Isabella Acres).

But while Jason is floundering, he meets a widower named Joe (Joe Putterlik) who sells used goods in a local print flyer (which is how July found and cast him), and is drawn into the elderly man’s company by his odd joie de vivre and curious home of personal artifacts that mirror Jason and Sophie’s domestic details. When Jason says to Joe about his relationship, “We never had these problems in the beginning,” Joe replies: “It’s OK, you’re just in the middle of the beginning.” It’s a weirdly genuine, neutral assessment of Jason’s heartache, but like so much of the figuring out that goes on in The Future, it’s soon undercut by Sophie’s giant doubts.

Not long after, Jason and Sophie have one of those dreaded middle of the night discussions, beginning with those dreaded middle-of-the-night words: “There’s something I have to tell you.”

From there July unravels the couple completely: Jason “stops time” and pleads with the Moon, trying to retain his love, as we experience his desperation in flashes of Sophie’s affair; Sophie collapses on the orange sweater that’s crawled to her in the San Fernando Valley from her old apartment and dances her first, true dance of the month, maybe longer. The status of their relationship hardly seems to matter by the final scenes: They’ve managed to shake loose of their former selves.

As Jason, Linklater is able to express much at difficult points without saying anything in a commanding performance. Putterlik, who died late last year, was a non-actor and offers a gem in his character role (and an admirably modest Moon, too). And Warshofsky’s lonely slimeball and Acres’ wounded and neglected pre-adolescent play perfectly off July’s spiralling turmoil.

July, it must be said, shimmers as Sophie, even while she tries to face up within herself to much of what PawPaw calls at one point, “The darkness that it’s not appropriate to talk about.”

The Future can feel muddled, uncertain and even chaotic at times, but those feelings and warped sense of self-perception are the ones July was trying to shine her cinematic torches on — and in the end her film burns brightly for it.